What Steve Jobs Learned From His Biggest Failure

Walter Isaacson's authorized biography of Steve Jobs traces the Apple co-founder's career in Silicon Valley--from its soaring highs to its crushing lows. Jobs has been hailed as a tech visionary, but he also weathered his fair share of dud products and nearly witnessed the demise of the company he founded in his youth.

In 1985, after Apple discontinued its poorly selling Lisa computer and faced flagging Macintosh sales, Jobs was ousted from his position as head of the company's Macintosh division. The decision came from the board of directors and CEO John Sculley, whom Jobs himself had selected for the position in 1983. Before the year's end, Jobs would leave Apple to found a new company, NeXT.

During Jobs' absence from Apple, Macintosh sales continued to struggle as competitive products from Microsoft began crowding the personal computing space. "Microsoft simply ripped off what other people did," Jobs said, according to Iassacson's telling. However, Jobs also said, "Apple deserved it. After I left, it didn't invent anything new. The Mac hardly improved. It was a sitting duck for Microsoft."

By 1997, Jobs was back at Apple, but the company's stock hovered around $4 a share, according to the New York Times. (To put that into perspective, Apple stock currently sits above $390 per share.) Jobs quickly cemented his position and, by 2000, was officially given the title of CEO.

During the course of Isaacson's interviews, Jobs shared what he saw to be his major mistake during those tumultuous years: Letting a desire for profitability outweigh passion.

"My passion has been to build an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products," Jobs told Isaacson. "[T]he products, not the profits, were the motivation. Sculley flipped these priorities to where the goal was to make money. It's a subtle difference, but it ends up meaning everything."

Jobs went on to describe the legacy he hoped he would leave behind, "a company that will still stand for something a generation or two from now."

"That's what Walt Disney did," said Jobs, "and Hewlett and Packard, and the people who built Intel. They created a company to last, not just to make money. That's what I want Apple to be."

He also stated the importance of helping Silicon Valley's next generation--the Larry Pages and Sergey Brins, the Mark Zuckerbergs. "That's how I'm going to spend part of the time I have left," Jobs told Isaacson two months before his death. "I can help the next generation remember the lineage of great companies here and how to continue the tradition. The Valley has been very supportive of me. I should do my best to repay."

During his near decade-long absence from Apple, Jobs also purchased a graphics company that would grow to become one of Hollywood's most successful animation studios. That company was Pixar. Even after he returned to Apple, Jobs continued to serve as CEO of the Pixar juggernaut for a time.

Jobs has credited his dramatic ouster from Apple as the key to his success with Pixar and his later success upon his return to Apple. In 2005, said the following, during a moving commencement address at Stanford University:

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life. [...] Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did.

"We've never worried about numbers. In the market place, Apple is trying to focus the spotlight on products, because products really make a difference. [...] Ad campaigns are necessary for competition; IBM's ads are everywhere. But good PR educates people; that's all it is. You can't con people in this business. The products speak for themselves."
-- Playboy interview, 1985

"That's been one of my mantras -- focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it's worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains."
-- BusinessWeek interview, May 1998

"The most compelling reason for most people to buy a computer for the home will be to link it into a nationwide communications network. We're just in the beginning stages of what will be a truly remarkable breakthrough for most people--as remarkable as the telephone."
-- Playboy interview, 1985

"It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them."
-- BusinessWeek interview, May 1998

"Picasso had a saying: 'Good artists copy, great artists steal.' We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas...I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians, poets, artists, zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world."
-- 1994

"[Y]ou can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something -- your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life."
-- Stanford University commencement address, June 2005.

"My sex life is pretty good these days, Walt. How's yours?"
-- Jobs's response to a question from Walt Mossberg about how Jobs feels about Google and if he feels "betrayed." (June, 2010)
(Jobs also added, "Well they decided to compete with us. We didn't go into the search business.")

"Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything -- all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart. ... Stay hungry. Stay foolish."
-- Stanford University commencement address, June 2005.

"I read a study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet. The condor used the least energy to move a kilometer. Humans came in with a rather unimpressive showing about a third of the way down the list....That didn't look so good, but then someone at Scientific American had the insight to test the efficiency of lomotion for a man on a bicycle and a man on a bicycle blew the condor away.
That's what a computer is to me: the computer is the most remarkable tool that we've ever come up with. It's the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds."
-- Interview for the documentary "Memory and Imagination," 1990

"My model for business is The Beatles. They were four guys who kept each other's kind of negative tendencies in check. They balanced each other and the total was greater than the sum of the parts. That's how I see business: great things in business are never done by one person, they're done by a team of people."
-- Interview with 60 Minutes, 2003